Guidelines+for+Assessment+in+English

**NOTE: This page needs updating!**

The primary purpose of school-based assessment is to improve students’ learning and the quality of the learning programme.

- from The New Zealand Curriculum Framework, Ministry of Education, 1993

It is important that teachers try to select a range of assessment tasks - diagnostic, formative and summative - appropriate to the teaching and learning programme. Teachers should use a range of formal and informal approaches to assessment to take account of students’ varying learning needs and styles. These include: • ongoing, informal assessment which provides immediate feedback, enhancing the learning as it proceeds • systematic observation by teachers • self-assessment, which enables students to monitor their own progress against specific objectives and evidence from their own work • peer assessment, which helps to improve learning and develop social and co operative skills • conferencing, valuable for diagnosing difficulties and reinforcing success • tests, based on different types of written tasks • benchmarks or exemplars • assessment using written assessment schedules based on the relevant achievement objectives and learning outcomes

- Summarised from: English in the New Zealand Curriculum, page 21. Planning and Assessment in English, page 59.

For standards based assessment: • learners’ targets are explicit • performance is compared with written criteria • results are descriptive indicating what the student knows, understands and can do • everyone who meets the standard is awarded credit at their level of achievement

Why use standards based assessment? • to identify and provide the teacher with information about what the student can and can’t do in order to: - develop appropriate learning programmes - identify for individual students what they need to do to fill the gaps in order to… (e.g. attempt level one Achievement Standards etc.) - establish for recording and reporting purposes what level the student has reached. This has a positive impact on learning.

